Chet Ramey wrote: > Daniel Musgrave wrote: >> I have found a seeming inconsistency with the behavior of the read >> builtin of bash (3.2.0(1)-release, also tested in 3.00.15(1)-release). >> I'm working on a Centos 4.4 system (RedHat derivative). Let me describe >> the conditions that cause the bug in as much detail as I have discovered >> thus far. > > There are a couple of things that might shed light on your situation. > First, [w] is a globbing pattern that matches `w'. Second, /usr/bin/w > exists as an executable file. > > So, in /usr/bin, [w] will be globbed to `w', since there is a matching > filename. > > Chet >
Of course, I had completely forgotten about globbing. I suppose the first thing I should have done would be to look in /usr/bin for a file called `w', but up until today I was unaware there were any binaries with single-character names (it would have been more obvious if I were getting `cp' back, or something). After reading the filename expansion section of the manual, it seems that setting the nullglob shell option would make the other patterns that I was inadvertently specifying expand into a null string if they didn't match any files in the directory, rather than just to the pattern themselves. Thanks for clearing that up. Daniel _______________________________________________ Bug-bash mailing list Bug-bash@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-bash
